401K? To get rich. Fuck that shit. How about: "Never work at a job with a 401K!" as a rule for how to get rich. Since your alternatives will then be to be poor and miserable or get really rich, you will be more motivated.
Personally, I'd shoot myself in my head if I ever caught myself thinking about protecting my 401K between money markets and equity markets. Figure out something meaningful. Name of my game. Hoarding biosurvival tickets earned working like some chipmunk trying to survive an endless winter that will inevitably kill them, so that you can enjoy the fleeting illusions of stability and more prosperity than your neighbor before your body turns to the same worm food theirs does seems a really shitty way to respond to finding yourself alive on this planet with a good mind and a brief window of autonomy where you might do something really meaningful.
I pretty much agree with your core idea here; "not having a 401k forces you to take care of your own retirement savings".
However, it seems like you think that saving for retirement is completely stupid. I don't mean to insult, but it sounds like when you feel like you can't make money anymore, you're going to down a bottle of whiskey and blow your brains out. Financially, that's actually probably the better idea, since you don't have to worry about having money for a zero-productivity endgame. The downside is you miss out on a lot of non-money advantages of retirement (grandkids, if you go that route, and various other things retired folks say they enjoy).
Just think of retirement funds this way; people are making sure they don't have to eat cat food bought with social security checks during the waning portion of their "brief window of autonomy", and they don't want to go for the aforementioned whiskey-and-suicide route because most people don't actually want to kill themselves.
I don't want to spend all the good years of my life living exactly like a rat doing whatever gymnastics get me enough pellets (dollars) to survive. I'd rather say "fuck that" and do what I want.
It's not a lack of money that would make me kill myself (and I don't drink alcohol, preferring drugs that enhance cognition). It's a lack of meaning. As long as I can write books, papers on ideas that interest me, or work on my patentable inventions, my life has meaning regardless of the money situation. But, if I'm spending my time worrying if I have tucked away my pellets as good as the neighbors, my life has no interest, and, at that point, why not get off the ride instead of spinning the wheel for no good reason?
Thank you for your candor. With views like that, it works out better for pellet-hording "rats"/"chipmunks" like myself since once you exit stage left via the whiskey/suicide route, that means there will be more "pellets" for us "rats" by way of your no longer using up the social security benefits! :-)
Personally, I'd shoot myself in my head if I ever caught myself thinking about protecting my 401K between money markets and equity markets. Figure out something meaningful. Name of my game. Hoarding biosurvival tickets earned working like some chipmunk trying to survive an endless winter that will inevitably kill them, so that you can enjoy the fleeting illusions of stability and more prosperity than your neighbor before your body turns to the same worm food theirs does seems a really shitty way to respond to finding yourself alive on this planet with a good mind and a brief window of autonomy where you might do something really meaningful.